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You don't see too many notebooks with 2GB of DDR RAM. The Mesh Dynamo PNB is one of the few that do, and it certainly packs a punch - with a WorldBench 5 score of 93, the Mesh outstrips the Alienware Area-51m 7700, which is almost twice as costly.

To stop the price of the Dynamo becoming astronomical, Mesh has compromised in a couple of areas. The processor is a 1.86GHz Pentium M 750, and while this is a good chip, it's certainly not at the top of the line. Again, the GeForce Go 6600 card is perfectly capable, but not nVidia's latest.

Nevertheless, this is a notebook that can handle pretty much anything you throw at it. This is the net result of upping the RAM, which means applications will run more smoothly and also means you can run more of them at the same time without slowing the system down too much.

With 100GB of space on the hard drive and a dual-layer DVD writer, all your storage and backup needs will be covered. All the wireless standards bar Bluetooth are catered for and the Dynamo is fairly light – but with a battery life of just over two and a half hours it'll be better as a desktop replacement than as a mobile device.

There are one or two concerns. The TFT display's screen is too dull and the colours are rather faded. There's no antivirus or office suite software included, presumably to keep the price down, and the warranty provides only one year of cover.

A great all-round notebook let down slightly by two things: its screen and its design. It's perfectly usable, it just looks rather dated - ugly, to be frank. The Mesh Dynamo Plus PNB doesn't do quite enough to win an award, but it's damn close.

With a 2GHz Intel Pentium M 760, 1GB of DDR RAM, a 256MB ATI Mobility Radeon X700 graphics card and an excellent 15.4in widescreen display, the AJP is geared up for good visual performance. It really delivers.

The Alienware Area 51 m15x is a gaming laptop that stomped all over our WorldBench 6 benchmark, earning the highest laptop performance score to date and running effortlessly through our current graphics tests.